Friday, October 12, 2012

Cheap, Fast Asian Huts for 25-28mm play

About two years ago, when I lived in Korea, I set up a samurai skirmish game with some of the local gamers. I was to host the game at my place and I needed some Asian style huts for the scenario (quasi-Japanese, but flexible enough to span several periods). Everything online or local was ridiculously expensive. Well I set to work as my wife was out of town and I was bored out of my mind.

So I used thin styroboard for bases for each house. I then used some cardboard cutouts for the frame (4 walls). I used toothpicks pushed through the middle of the corrugated cardboard as stabilization and glued the walls to the base. I set two to three pieces of pluck foam (left over from foam figure trays) to reinforce the interior walls and let everything set for a while. After everything set hard, I cut strips from some old reed placemats we had to wrap around the outsde of each hut. I glued them and after dry cut out he windows and doors tat they coered from the orginal cardoard frame.

The true challenge came with the building of the roofs. I used old
chopsticks and built them into a semi Norse/ Japanese design frame roof.
Actually the wood glue wouldn't hold so I tied them with dental floss
and then glued them. They are not connected to the houses, simply
resting on them. This allows you to remove the roof and move characters
inside as well.

For the roof cover, I cut up an old beach towel and spray painted the inside to get the mossy peat type appearance. Its still a little grey, but good enough for me. All in all it took me about five hours (including waiting for glue and paint to dry). The next day I painted the interiors and sprayed the roofs. I would say that total price for this project was about $3 a house and they came out pretty well. They are also quite sturdy and very playable.